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Comment by cucumber3732842 | Hacker News Reader

>We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness.

We eliminated benches to reduce the rate at which the problematic homeless cross paths with the complainers.

The DPW as an organization doesn't give a shit about how many commuter's asses a bench serves from 6am to 8pm. It just knows that every day when Karen sees a homeless man sleeping on that bench at 5AM she submits a complaint from the web form.

From their stupid "not my job, I just solve tickets" keyhole view of the situation removing the benches makes the problem smaller and they will iterate on that until complaint equilibrium is reached.

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When I was in San Francisco, I had a homeless man with one eye (the empty eye socket actively oozing) come up to me unprovoked (quite literally unprovoked, I was just on a walk and not interacting with anybody at all), get within 2 centimeters of my face, and scream at the top of his lungs "I WILL MURDER YOU". He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with my pulse at 140).

Suffice to say, I don't think it's fair to categorize me as a Karen for asserting that San Francisco has a large number of problematic homeless people. I could give about 8 other stories (from SF, Boston, NYC, and Chicago) that happened to me, two of which (both SF) include grown men dropping their pants, exposing their genitals, and visibly pooping on public streets where children were present, with no attempt to obtain any degree of privacy.

These aren't stories from my friends, these are things that I personally witnessed and experienced. These aren't 'oh that guy is ugly and smelly' stories, these are 'if I did that myself I would be arrested' stories.

> He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with my pulse at 140).

Did you call the police after this person made a threat on your life?

What would the police do about it, arrest the homeless person? Would the local criminal justice system have the capacity to charge and convict them if the cops did so? Many of the cities where visible homelessness is a problem also have shortages of cops that cause them to triage what sorts of incidents they send an officer to respond to?

I probably would not have called the police after this person if this happened to me, because I expect they would do nothing about it.

Where do you live?

In the U.S. police will show up, investigate, and absolutely arrest someone who made a loud, direct, threat to murder another human being in public.

Not anywhere being discussed here. Chicago it may or may not get added to a dispatch call. Chances of it ever being followed up on are slim. At best you might get a patrol car rolling through a couple hours later to mark the ticket solved.

It’s a pretty common experience for anyone who is out and about using public transit in public spaces. They know nothing will be done to the suspect so what’s the point of bothering to respond at all?

I assure you that problematic homeless people sleep on benches in public spaces at times during the day when normal people using the public transit system normally would like to use them (also sometimes people, reasonably enough, want to take public transit late at night or in the early morning). That's why the authorities remove the benches.

You use disparaging slurs ("Karen") to refer to a woman who just wants to ride the bus to get to work and earn an living, and you politely call a person who is a public nuisance a "homeless man".

Karen isn't a name in the same way that Boommer isn't an age. It's a state of mind.

We're not talking about the people who have been genuinly victimized. We're talking about the people who wring their hands over some smelly guy in some corner on the subway. Because they dominate the stats.

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